Odie:

Odie is our little black Abyssinian with a white bow tie under his chin.

He's Cat #2 at our house. 13-year old Garfield, Bianca's cat, is Cat #1. Both are spoiled rotten, mostly because we allow them extra slack due to the fact they are persecuted.

We live in Oakville, probably the only town in the world where cats are held captive. They're not allowed outdoors to control the town's rodents because they might be a danger to songbirds. When given the choice, our councillors here are strictly for the birds.

Never mind that the Egyptian Pharaohs valued their cats enough to mummify them and take them into the next world with them when they expired.

Never mind that following the San Francisco earthquake when the rodents threatened to take over the ruins, cats went as high as US $200 each. That's in 1906 dollars. The town councillors in Oakville took the time off from their busy schedules to appease the rodents among us.

Anyhow, back to Odie. A true Abyssinian, he's impossible to contain. Most of the neighbors appreciate him because he cleans up the rodents around the neighborhood. When he's tired of playing with them, he bites their heads off and leaves the little corpses on the back lawn. I use the long-handled picker-uppers from Dollarama to pick them up and put them in the garbage.

That ice storm made outside excursions uncomfortable for him and Garf and we finally had to put him in the garage. We checked at half-hour intervals to see if he was ready to come back in. This went on until bedtime with no sign of Odie. Finally, Eleanor got him in around 10pm.

"He's in!" she hollered, and I continued surfing the Web. Some time later, there was a clunk somewhere and I assumed it was one of our neighbors fidgeting outside with a snow shovel.

Then there were more clunks and it dawned on me that the sounds came from the bathroom. Sure enough, there was Odie in the contoured tub playing ping-pong with a mouse.

It was about the third or fourth time he did that this season. Very sneakily, he'd bring a mouse in with him from the garage and take it straight upstairs into the big tub where he would play with it to his heart's content until someone put a paper coffee cup over it and carried it outside. 

People who think cats are not too bright should give their heads a shake. It takes some imagination for a cat to figure out that the slick sides of a tub are about the only thing in a household to be impossible for a mouse to climb. Those little suckers could go straight up the sides of a brick wall outside when a cat's chasing them.

Anyhow, I scooped the mouse and took that paper coffee cup outside. It was cold and the poor mouse was all curled up shivering in the bottom and I felt sorry for him, so I put the cup down horizontally near a big pile of leaves that the wind had swirled into a heap outside the front door. 

I checked the next morning and there was no sign of either the mouse or the cup following a cold and windy night.